To Facilitate Easier-To-Design Weapon Balance...

[Lumireaver]

weapons need more balanceable parameters. Way back when, default polarities could be used to influence weapon balance, but that's not a real option anymore. Currently (primary and secondary) weapons have:

• Bullet/damage type
• Crit chance
• Crit multiplier
• Fire rate
• Clip size
• Reload speed
• Accuracy/Recoil - Actually, are these two ideas part of the same stat? Way back when, weapons used to kick your camera up, but people got motion sick so we can't do that anymore. Hrmm... More on that in a bit.

(Damage isn't really a "balanceable" parameter. It's the last variable you tweak in order to keep DPS in-line with your target effectiveness.)

 

Melee weapons would seem to have quite a few more stats, but that's mostly because they have separate damage type, crit chance, and crit multiplier, stats for charge, jump, and slide, attacks. (This isn't a bad thing or anything, it's just something worth noting.) Beyond that though, they do have stats for max targets, and swing/cleave radius, which is interesting... (Anyway, I'm mostly concerned with guns. I'll jump back to melee some other time.).

 

Keeping this in mind, there's definitely room for a bunch of other stats (and other junk) which could help to differentiate a weapon from others in the same class. Concise list:

• Innate penetration - People have been asking for innate penetration on certain weapons (most often the sniper rifles, and the Corpus Flux Rifle, and Spectra,) and it certainly makes a fair bit of sense. Beyond that, though, there are lots of weapons which could use a bit of innate penetration to bring them up to par. People tend to mod to bring out the strong points in a weapon. (Huge hypothetical incoming: If DoT/status mods ever become a thing, high penetration weapons could become CC tools. People could stacking armor penetration and stun mods to slow down a platoon of lancers.)
• Damage falloff - Most environments in the game are pretty small, but some of the crap we shoot (fist sized bolts?) could reasonably be affected by damage fall off. Additionally, certain ammo types (plasma/laser weapons) could be given a kind of inverted damage falloff to encourage/reward distant shots. (With the internal logic being that after XYm the projectile has reached a point of optimum stability.)
• Equip speed - Read as: "How long it takes to switch to this weapon/recover from melee." A mod was recently released to play with this value. Certain heavy weapons ought to take longer to equip than certain lightweight weapons. Differentiating weapons in this way might help to add value to weapons which are otherwise a bit light in other ways. A Gorgon won't get you out of a pinch as readily as Grakata. (Ha.) In case it needs to be said, there probably shouldn't be any huge values here. Certain weapons should just be fractions of a second faster.
• Walking speed while aiming - Walking with one of the heavier weapons out (and aiming with it) could stand to feel heavier? Aiming with a Seer should allow you to walk faster than aiming with a Vulkar.

So, on accuracy/recoil. Why doesn't recoil fling our reticle out of place? This way people would have to move their camera themselves which (should) have been able to prevent the motion sickness. Currently it seems like we've only got accuracy/bullet spread, which is alright (because we're super space ninjas and arguably unaffected by weapon kick, but) actual recoil could introduce an element of skill based balance into the game where certain weapons play better, but only for people who are accustomed to the recoil pattern. (As opposed to accuracy/spread which is mostly RNG.)

 

Disclaimer: I suck at math and spreadsheets. Also damage fall off is kind of a thing already, but it's not being used enough. Certain weapons could be more useful if their maximum effective range was farther than other weapons. Apologies for the disorganized post.

 

Another disclaimer: Apologies for the disorganized post. There's a thunderstorm out and I didn't want to lose the post to a power outage while organizing it. :-P

[Lumireaver]

It might also help if we diversified locational damage multipliers as well as crit mechanics on a per-weapon basis.

 

Moving locational damage multipliers over to weapons (instead of enemies) allows DE to balance specific weapons with a bit more granularity. Certain guns could do similar damage regardless of the target zone hit, while marksmen weapons could heavily favor well placed shots.

 

Regarding crit mechanics, giving weapons unique ones would help to make them play differently. Here's a couple of example mechanics:

• Weapon A - Increase crit chance while hitting a weak spot.
• Weapon B - Increase crit chance while firing the last 25% of the magazine.
• Weapon C - Increase crit chance at long ranges.
• Weapon D - Increase crit chance at close ranges.
• Weapon E - Incrementally increase crit chance for each successful hit. (Rewarding sustained accuracy.)

As you can see, two weapons in the same category with identical stats and mod loadouts would play differently if they had a different mechanic influencing their crits. If one minigun bore with Weapon B's mechanic as opposed to Weapon A's, one might opt to include a reload mod in favor of an accuracy mod to more safely capital on crit damage.

 

A weapon like the Ignis could crit more the longer the enemy remains under sustained fire, rewarding players for killing things with fire.

Edited September 17, 2013 by Lumireaver